Nurses and other attending staff in a hospital ward or hospital wing work under conditions involving high pressure, stress and long hours. These care givers must remain alert to respond to patient needs, in both emergency and non-emergency situations. Due to economic practicalities and the ever-increasing costs of medical care, it is necessary to make the most efficient use of nurses and staff on call in a hospital ward or hospital wing, particularly at night when nurse and staff levels are maintained at a minimum. While technological and medical breakthroughs have led to amazing treatment advances over the past few decades, many other factors have led to challenges in the delivery of healthcare services. For example, the number of available hospital beds has drastically decreased during this same period as a result of the many hospital closings and consolidations occurring across the county. Unfortunately, the reduction in beds comes at a time when demand for them is increasing. The increase in demand stems from the rising need for healthcare services as a result of factors like population growth and the aging “baby boomer” demographic. These and other factors have meant that it is becoming increasingly difficult for hospitals to meet the demands placed upon, which is often most apparent in the backlogs that can be easily observed in almost every Emergency Department throughout the nation. Compounding the physical capacity issues are human capacity and process or workflow components as well. The shortage of clinical personnel, such as nurses and technologists, also impacts the ability of hospitals to deliver care in an efficient manner. Sadly, the current processes of handling bed management and patient placement in many hospitals today, leads to delays, lag time and bottlenecks in patient flow. Thus, there is presently a clear need for a more efficient process.
The desire, however, to optimize hospital efficiency is of secondary importance relative to the primary objective, that of providing a high level of medical care to patients. For example, if nurse and staff levels are reduced for the sake of efficiency without any corresponding simplification of duties and responsibilities, the level of patient care will decrease. Therefore, it is desirable to maximize the efficiency of nurses and staff on call in a hospital wing or hospital ward, but to do so in a manner which does not increase the work load or stress levels of these professional care givers nor decrease the level of patient care. Thus, it is of primary importance for hospitals to have the ability to access and manage information related to bed management and patient placement, including the existing demand for patients waiting for available beds, managing the discharge and transportation of patients, managing room preparation and cleaning for new patients, and the management of the placement of their patients without causing increased hardship and confusion to the hospital personnel.
One approach to maximizing the efficiency of nurses and other hospital staff involves providing information needed by these professionals in a location remote from a patient room. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 5,699,038 to Ulrich et al. discloses a bed status information system of hospital beds which provides remote instantaneous retrieval of unique identification information about the bed and provides status information related to the position of the bed, the configuration of the mattress surface, the status of the safety systems on the bed, and the current state of various patient care systems integrated with the bed. Monitoring of patient information therefore does not require attendance within the room to locally view and interpret various types of information. U.S. Pat. No. 5,867,821 to Ballantyne et al. discloses a method and apparatus for electronically accessing and distributing personal health care information and services in hospitals and homes in which certain information, ranging from patient health record information to patient and operating room monitoring information, is distributed to a nursing station within a hospital.
Providing information to nurses and other hospital staff at a centralized remote location away from patient room creates certain problems however. Among the problems is presenting information to the medical professionals in a way that assists them in effectively monitoring the information without increasing their level of stress, which may occur if they feel overwhelmed by the amount of information provided and time required to retrieve it. Moreover, simply providing access to information and even the ability to manage or modify the information at one particular location can be futile in a busy hospital environment. This is due to the fact that many of the persons responsible for patent flow are often themselves in a state of movement about the hospital thereby preventing relevant information from being acted upon by the personnel having a need for the information or who have knowledge of updated information. A need for a solution to the aforementioned problems has therefore been recognized.